


Fr[i]en[ds and En]emies

by josephina_x



Series: Dimension 46’\-A [7]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (a.k.a. the violence), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Bill Cipher Being Bill Cipher, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon, WARNING: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING MATERIAL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 08:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13566594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: Mabel and Bill talk a bit. That doesn’t go horribly well. Then Ford catches up with Bill, and things go from bad to worse.





	Fr[i]en[ds and En]emies

**Author's Note:**

> Fic: Fr[i]en[ds and En]emies  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Summary: Mabel and Bill talk a bit. That doesn’t go horribly well. Then Ford catches up with Bill, and things go from bad to worse.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: I probably shouldn’t need to say this, but lemme cover my bases here, just in case: Bill is an unreliable narrator. (Just sayin’.)
> 
> Yes, I probably could’ve split this into 2-3 smaller fics, but meh. Here ya go.
> 
> Transcript used for some direct-from-episode dialogue is from: <http://gravityfalls.wikia.com/wiki/Sock_Opera/Transcript>  
>   
> _Author’s Note, 2018-Jul-29: This fic begins close to noon on Day 11 of Bill Cipher’s return, shortly after the events of[Mastermind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12952251). Bill’s been sitting out on the porch thinking. Stan has finished talking out agreement-stuff with Dipper and Mabel inside the Shack, and Mabel comes outside to talk to Bill..._

\---

Bill was still sitting on the porch when Shooting Star came out again.

The only thing he’d really done in the meantime was having gone from sitting upright to having slid down to mostly lying flat on his back... unless staring up into the rafters of the overhang for the porch, while wondering if there was something wrong with him for being more inclined to taking the path of least resistance in not fighting the Pines -- rather than attempting to destroy them -- counted as ‘doing something’.

Bill frowned, because...

It was easier to just… live alongside them, so long as they didn’t attack him. Sixer was the only real problem on that front, according to Stanley. It was frustrating to Bill, because Sixer was the one who he wanted to fight with the least out of all of them.

...except he’d already tried that once, tried just living alongside them, during Weirdmageddon. He’d done that, had left the Shack alone. He hadn’t gone looking for Stanley and Glasses and the others when the rest of the Zodiac somehow avoided petrification by his flying eyes. He hadn’t actively sought out Pine Tree when he hadn’t gotten himself eaten by 8-Ball and Teeth -- heck, he’d even done the kid a favor by turning him into a joke to the Henchmaniacs, showing how outclassed he’d been so that Bill didn't have to kill him outright for defying him openly -- actually given him a fighting chance by sending the two dumbest and most easily-distracted Henchmaniacs in the bunch after him.

And what had his Zodiac done, in the face of his magnanimity, in letting them live despite the threat they’d all posed to his power? --They’d turned the Shack into a weapon and kicked in his front door, _looking_ for a fight!

And, in contrary fashion, now that he wasn’t a bodiless energy being and had _plenty_ of weaknesses -- _stupid human-ish body!!_ \-- none of them were pressing their advantage or even _attempting_ to fight him! (...Well, except for Sixer, but he’d been doing that for awhile now, so Bill was used to it. At this point, it was almost kind of their _thing_ , really.) Now, he was living alongside them just fine, more or less.

...So, what, was the ‘trick’ of it to not have a front door to kick down? Or, Axolotl forbid, make sure that the door they’d have to be kicking down was _one of their own_ , so they’d be less inclined to do it because, what, they’d be the ones having to clean up after themselves? -- _That_ didn’t make any sense, _at all_.

Why did people have to be so confusing all of the time!?! Dealing with other demons was _so_ much easier...

It was thoughts like this that he was thinking, when he heard footsteps coming towards him. Bill opened his eyes and started to sit up, until he realized who it was and let himself slide back down the wall again.

...and now here was Shooting Star again, the _least_ demon-like of the bunch of them. Ugh.

“Are you okay?” was the first question out of her mouth, and Bill really wasn’t feeling up for this right now.

“Define ‘okay’,” Bill said, because _ugh!_ Also, how in the heck was he supposed to answer that question, anyway?!

Shooting Star scrunched up her face at him a bit. “You don’t know what ‘okay’ is?”

Bill narrowed his eyes at her.

She huffed out a breath and put her hands on her hips. “Do you want to grab me and toss me into Dipper again?”

“--Destroy you,” Bill corrected her.

Shooting Star gave him a look he couldn’t parse. When she didn’t say anything, he made an educated guess that that look was supposed to be a questioning one.

“‘Grabbing and tossing you into Dipper again’ is an action, not a want,” he elaborated. “‘Destroying you’ is a want.”

“Uh huh,” said Shooting Star, crossing her arms. “Okay. Do you want to do _that?_ ”

...Well, that certainly called for a definitive response!

“I still kind of want to destroy you,” Bill told her, but his rage wasn’t really in it.

“Uh huh,” she said. “Are you sure?” she added, looking down at him almost skeptically.

He didn’t want to admit that he was mostly over it, and that it all seemed stupid now. At this point, now he was mostly angry with _himself_ ...for not being able to deal with any amount of water without choking, apparently, and his general lack of self-control over his current physical body’s physical reactions, in conjunction with his messed-up mental state.

So instead, he said, “...Maybe.”

“Welllll… if you _really_ want to fight...” Shooting Star pulled out her grappling hook and gave him a braces-filled smile. “Best two out of three?”

Bill closed his eyes, tossed his arms over his head to cover his eyes, and made a frustrated sound, because it sounded like she was _humoring_ him.

She didn’t even have her grappling hook pointed at him -- she was pointing it towards the ceiling, not even close to his general direction.

“Why aren’t you taking me seriously?” Bill complained, pulling his arms down to his sides again to glare up at her.

Shooting Star put her hands on her hips again, grappling hook still in her grip. “Grunkle Stan said you wouldn’t attack us unless we did something first,” she informed him, as she was _putting her grappling hook away_ \-- really, did _no-one_ in this family take him seriously?! “I didn’t mean to attack you; I was just playing around. I didn’t know you wouldn’t be okay if I sprayed you with water in the face, and I wouldn’t have done it if I did,” she told him matter-of-factly, to Bill’s utmost surprise. “It was an accident. He said accidents get forgiven, and that you know I didn’t meant to hurt you now,” she told him authoritatively.

Bill let out a frustrated sigh that was almost a snarl. Trust Stanley to have shared that he’d already mostly finished working out that ‘accidents’ thing with him, while towing him back to the Shack, after catching up with him again after the ‘bear’ issue.

“I’m _not_ hurt,” Bill protested, because he wasn’t, and it wasn’t a good idea to let her -- or anyone else she might tell, like Pine Tree -- think otherwise.

“Okay, good,” was the next unexpected response he got out of her. “Are you sorry you hurt me?” she asked him.

“-- _I thought you were attacking me!_ ” Bill spat out at her, then grimaced. “I... wasn’t sure,” he admitted, running a hand over his face. “--But it felt like one! You stupid humans and your…” He shook his head, then pointed out with no small annoyance, “--I barely touched you!” Because he’d _made_ allowances for her, for that, and yet--! “And then you _were_ attacking me; you tried to kick me,” he added with a narrow-eyed look.

“I tried to kick you because you got scary and grabbed me.” She frowned down at him. “Dipper wasn’t attacking you, and you hurt him, too, you know!”

“He rushed me!” Bill said, shoving himself up the side of the Shack’s outer wall, to sit almost upright. “Fighting one of you is like fighting both of you,” he complained, crossing his arms.

Shooting Star tilted her head and looked at him. “Well, yeah,” she said. “We’re twins. If you mess with one of us--”

“--then I have to fight both of you. So if _one_ of you messes with _me_ , it might as well be the _both_ of you, because I’m _going_ to fight back -- I’m not _stupid_ , I know how this is going to work out,” Bill ground out, tossing his arms up in the air. And it wasn’t as though he hadn’t encountered this phenomenon enough times already -- with _them_ specifically, even! -- to not have learned it the hard way even if he _had_ been that stupid -- _who did she think he was?!_

Shooting Star frowned down at him for awhile.

“Okay,” she said.

“...’Okay’?” Bill echoed. Also: argh! Why did ‘okay’ have to mean so many things!? He really missed being able to read minds whenever he wanted; it made him feel a lot less stupid. “What do you mean, _‘okay’?_ ”

“Okay, you’re right,” Shooting Star told him. “That’s not fair.”

Bill stared up at her incredulously.

And then he started to laugh.

He laughed so hard that he ended up flat on his back on the floorboards of the porch again, and then he laughed some more.

When he finally started to calm down again, rolling over onto his side to mostly drown out his last few laughs into his forearm, nearly face-down, Shooting Star spoke up again, with an odd tone of voice that he didn’t quite get. ”Why is that funny?”

“Because…” he wheezed out. “Because…” he got an elbow under him and looked up at her, eyes full of amusement, “You think that it’s not _fair_ ,” he all-but-giggled out. “You think the two of you can actually _take_ me. HA!” He slapped a hand against the floorboards.

Shooting Star was looking at him with a very different look, after that. “We’ve taken you on before and won!”

“Haha, what?” Bill said, collapsing into a relaxed crossed-arm pose to cushion his chin. “When?”

“When? --Every time!” she protested. At his incredulous look, she added, “--In Grunkle Stan’s mind! We beat you there!”

“Gideon had already hung up,” he reminded her. “When we were fighting, I cleared out everything you were trying to do, before I left, and then I left _because it was a waste of my time_ ,” he told her.

She shifted in place slightly. “We kept you from getting the combination to the safe.”

“No, you didn’t; I got that!” Bill reminded her cheerily. “You just nyarfed it into another memory.”

“And won!”

Bill rolled his eyes. “I’m the Master of the Mind. I’ve done deep memory-dives before. I could’ve gotten it back, easily. --I would have, if Gideon hadn’t already hung up.” The impatient brat. “I wasn’t looking for it because _I_ cared about knowing it.” He shrugged. “I could have crushed you, for losing me my deal, I just didn’t feel like it.”

“So you admit it! We won!” Shooting Star said, punching her fists into the air and grinning like she was happy.

Bill raised an arm and propped his chin up on a hand. Flat on his stomach, he kicked his feet up into the air behind him.

“No,” he said patiently, twirling a foot in the air behind him absently. “‘Winning’ would imply that you’d done something to me so that I couldn’t fight anymore. Like actually beating me into the floor of Stanley’s Mindscape. Or killing me.” Not that they’d managed to actually form the Zodiac Circle. “Or shattering me.” Like Stanley _had_ done in the Fearamid. “Or caging me someplace I couldn’t get out of.” Not that he was _ever_ going to let himself get stuck in a decaying dimension again for any length of time! “Or otherwise doing something to keep me from doing something like that ever again.” Not that he could think of anything, outside of them making a deal with him, that would accomplish that -- though getting a deal would be _him_ winning, not them. “--Or _at least_ tiring me out to the point that I couldn’t continue fighting anymore just then,” he added at the end, in deference to Stanley’s magic-interrupting technique -- which _was_ a legitimate way of beating him and winning a round of battle, in his opinion -- despite how much he loathed thinking on the very idea of that ever possibly happening again.

Bill watched as Shooting Star’s arms started to droop slightly from their initial upraised position, and her smile slowly did as well.

She let out a nervous sort of laugh. “...What?” She sounded a little confused, in lowering tones. “But…”

“That’s winning,” Bill said succinctly. “Don’t you know what winning is?” He was a little surprised that he was finding himself having to explain this to her. “--Actually beating me. Which you _didn’t_ do,” he noted. “I got annoyed with you for losing me my potential deal with Gideon, and I blew off some steam, and then I decided it was all too much effort for not enough gain for me to keep wasting my time fighting with you all just then,” especially with Stanley about to wake up. “So I left.” He kicked his feet in the air behind him. “The whole ‘I was letting you off the hook, because you might come in handy later’ thing should’ve been clear to you when I _told you that_ ,” he said to her. “Did you think I was lying?” he asked her incredulously. “--Why else do you think I didn’t bother to visit each of you individually in your dreams the next time you all fell asleep, to give you screaming nightmares that you wouldn’t be able to get out of on your own, that would drive each of you completely insane, to teach you all a lesson about _getting in my way_?” he informed her casually.

Shooting Star’s hands had dropped down closer to her chest. She was staring at him.

“Drive us insane…?” she echoed.

“Well, sure. Like Glasses? Though that was more of an in-person looksie than a nightmare-visit, that broke his mind,” Bill groused. He’d been _right_ in the middle of feeding when Glasses had stuck his head into the Nightmare Realm, taken one look at him, and started screaming. _Rude_ , much? “It’s not like I haven’t done that to people before -- to other humans, even!” he told her. “And the Prophecy only ever said that you all needed to be _alive_ at the time that I tried to enter this dimension for me to be successful, not **sane** ,” he added. “--Otherwise, I’d have been in some serious trouble, HA!” At the blank look that got him from her...

“...You know that the only reason I didn’t just kill you and your sibling outright in the Fearamid once I was here in physical form was because I wanted to capture you as live hostages to use against Sixer. Because I wanted something out of that big brain of his, that I couldn’t just read straight out of his mind, what with that metal plate he’s got in there in the way. ...Right?” he told her, now staring at her curiously, wondering what, exactly, she thought had been going on there, too. And how wrongly she must have misunderstood things then, too, to think of that as having ‘won’, as well, since it had been yet another time that she'd ‘taken him on’...

Shooting Star gave him a look that made him realize that she must obviously be in denial. “Whaaaat? You’re cray-cray--” she began.

“Well, yeah! Though I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything,” he told her. “Why do you people never believe me when I tell you I’m insane?” he asked, only semi-rhetorically. “--Y’know, if I’d just wanted you dead, I could’ve vaporized you and your brother on the spot with a finger-gun laserbeam, like I did to Time Baby when that partycrashing jerk showed up,” he told her casually, making the finger-gesture at her. It would have been complete overkill to use it on a couple of human kids, but the point stood. “Or I could’ve just squeezed you a little too hard when I was floating you both up in the air, after I caught up with you again,” he said, starting to smile. “Or I could’ve snapped my fingers and offed both of you together _immediately_ instead of threatening to pick just one of you, before even bringing you back to the main room. Or turned you into decorations like your friends, instead of sticking you in that cage, and then set you on fire and slowly burned you from the bottom of your pennants up to the ceiling while Sixer and Stanley looked on and screamed,” he added with a grin, kind of getting into it. Because, really, there were _so_ many ways he could’ve done it that would’ve been such _fun!_ “Or--”

“STOP!!” she yelled at him, putting her hands over her ears.

Bill stopped talking. Stanley had explained in great detail to him about ‘stop’ and ‘no’, and what he should do and not do in those circumstances; apparently, it was _really important_ to humans. So he watched her and waited, head cocked to the side.

Oddly, her eyes were wide and her breathing looked a little erratic. Her chin had dropped down to her chest, and he watched her take multiple shallow breaths before she lifted her head again.

“Y-you… y-y-you…” She was staring down at him like she’d never seen him before.

...Hmmmmm. That was technically a stop to the ‘stop!!’, but she hadn’t really said anything he could respond to, so Bill kept on waiting.

She took in a slow, deeper breath, and seemed to gather herself up mentally.

She gave him a shaky smile.

“Well, at least you can’t do any of that stuff anymore!” she said, almost cheerily.

Bill laughed.

Shooting Star frowned at him. “You--” she huffed out a breath. “You _can’t_ do that stuff, anymore,” she insisted, a little more strongly. “Grunkle Stan _proved_ \--”

“--that I really needed to speed up my game,” Bill told her. “I’m more used to taking my time and dealing out some serious shock-and-awe, with more power than anybody else can match at my disposal.” ...Well, _lately_ anyway. At the very beginning of things, that first hundred million years, dealing with things in his decaying dimension had been a bit rough. “Being restricted to channelling _only_ baseline-magic, and remembering to do so at low enough energy levels that I won’t burn out this physical body, _and_ having to think up, think through, _and_ cast stuff, all in less than a _second_ is…” Bill pulled a face, “... _new_.” ‘ _Yeah, let’s go with that_ ,’ he thought.

“You can’t do anything outside the barrier without us being able to stop you,” she insisted. “And you can’t do anything inside the barrier around the Shack, either!”

Bill stared up at her incredulously.

“Didn’t Stanley tell you--” he began, then stopped, stunned as he realized that Shooting Star _didn’t know_.

He shoved himself up from his stomach, onto his knees, all the senses he had just then suddenly awake and fully _alert_ , because _what game was Stanley playing at here?!_

The more he thought about it, mind racing, the less he liked it. The conclusions he was drawing were…

He shifted to a crouched posture, bracing his hands against his knees to be able to push himself upright quickly if he needed to, and frowned at her furiously while demanding, “Shooting Star, _what did Stanley tell you about the explosion out in the woods eighteen minutes ago?_ ”

Shooting Star looked down at him, clearly not in the loop on what the problem was. “He said that one of his bear traps went off.”

Bill stared up at her.

“Stanley told you this?” he said, feeling a little… like the inside of his head was lighter than the rest of his body? Full of bad air? A little wobbly? But also spinny? --Whatever it was, it wasn’t a _fun_ feeling.

Shooting Star began with, “Well, yeah--” then stopped for a moment, before she continued with, “...Grunkle Ford said that Grunkle Stan told him that that was what it was.”

‘-- _And Sixer believed that?_ ’ Bill thought hysterically.

He was on his feet and halfway to the door to go inside and track Stanley down and demand to know _what he was thinking?!?!_ , a whirlwind of half-thoughts forming and being discarded and reforming and tearing themselves apart again into unstable bits of malformed logic, all the while -- trying and failing-failing- _failing_ to take this new insanity into account, _he needed to talk to Stanley_ \-- when Shooting Star grabbed him by the arm.

And that cut through everything going through his mind like a knife.

Bill whipped his head down to stare at her.

“What are you doing,” he said tonelessly, because she was _touching him_. Trying to restrain him? --Slow him down.

“I-- What’s wrong?” She was looking up at him wide-eyed.

“ _Let go._ ” One warning. That was it. That was all he’d give--

“--You’re _shaking_ ,” she said, staring at the arm she was holding. “You… you’re _scared_.” She sounded shocked.

“I’m _not_ scared!” he spat out, straightening, offended at the very thought. He just needed to know what was going on! How dared she even suggest such a thing?! “I--” He looked down at her with contempt and readied himself to _rip_ his arm from her grasp and--

Then he stopped. Completely. Stared down at her and the arm she was holding and…

...he turned his head away slightly, slowly raised his free left arm, looked at his hand...

“I’m… _shaking_ …” Bill breathed out, staring. “Why am I…”

...because Shooting Star wasn’t wrong about _that_. He _was_ shaking. **Visibly**.

And then he slowly moved that hand to his chest and realized that his breathing was erratic, too. Almost like Shooting Star’s had been before.

...Was it contagious?

Bill closed his eyes, gritted his teeth (ew, separate mouth, _why?!_ ), and _tried_ to exert control, but he didn’t know what he needed to do to _fix this_ \--

‘ _This body is_ clearly _defective!_ ’

\--and he wasn’t sure he _could_ fix this, what was going on with his body, what it was doing to his mind -- not without Stanley. Stanley explained things like this. Told him how to deal with them. Made them _make sense_. He _needed_...

He pushed himself forward, didn’t even try to pull away from Shooting Star--

‘ _Either she’ll let go or get pulled along,_ ’ and at that point, he was losing the capacity to care which…

\--and stopped short when he heard Sixer growl out at his left, “ _There_ you are.”

“Grunkle Ford?” he heard Shooting Star say, and from the level of surprise in her voice, it was very clear to him that she hadn’t been trying to slow him down for Sixer’s benefit.

Bill turned towards him, blinking, wondering what Sixer wanted _now_. He hadn’t announced himself via gunshot, at least, so it obviously _wasn’t_ going to be the normal sort of thing they’d had going on lately -- for the last thirty-odd years or so -- of the chase-and-be-chased sort, but what kind of talk--?

Sixer, who didn’t waste any time, vaulted the railing up onto the porch, and sprinted forward so fast that Bill didn’t even have time to blink. Sixer came at him sideways, immediately fisted both hands in Bill’s shirt and pulled him around and backwards -- back-and-back-and-back, Bill nearly tripping over his own feet as he tried to keep himself upright -- to slam him back-first up against the porch-post closest to them, and at some point he lost Shooting Star along the way.

Bill got his hands around Sixer’s wrists, but it was already clear that Sixer wasn’t going to be letting go until--

“--I know it was you!” Sixer stated, glaring at him. “Stan wouldn’t put traps out in the woods for _anything!_ He knows full well that I and the niblings go out exploring in those woods daily. He wouldn’t risk us getting hurt, caught in some sort of metal trap, let alone tagged by anything _explosive!_ \--What did you _do!?_ ” Sixer demanded, and Bill shuddered, because this _wasn’t_ the usual sort of talk they had, and _he didn’t know what to do_.

He couldn’t snap his fingers and change the playing field, couldn’t go insubstantial and slip his way out of Sixer’s grip, couldn’t disappear, couldn’t split himself into multiples of himself and slide sideways that way--

\-- couldn’t do anything he’d normally do, because they weren’t in the Mindscape or the Dreamscape --

\-- couldn’t use magic because they were both inside the barrier --

\-- _couldn’t laugh this off, because **this wasn’t a game** , this was **serious**_ \--

\--Stanley had lied to his own sibling about what Bill could do, and Sixer wanted to talk about _that_. But Bill couldn’t think of why Stanley would do that, it was so far beyond the bounds of their agreement that-- it couldn’t be part of that protective ‘kid’ stuff, that didn’t make sense, _he’d lied to Sixer_ \--

Bill didn’t want to lie to Sixer -- he didn’t need to keep things from him anymore, now that he was out -- and Stanley knew that Bill would tell Sixer about anything he asked, so why would Stanley--?!

He needed to know why Stanley had lied. He didn’t know if this was part of their agreement or not. --If it was, it went too far by far, so beyond the bounds of _anything_ that Bill was comfortable with that he was having trouble even formulating the right equations to mentally _describe_ it.

\--But _if it was_ , if it was part of the agreement, then _he’d_ need to lie, too -- it wasn’t just a _truce_ they had, it was a **mutual nonaggression agreement** \-- such an agreement required them to _actively support_ each other when necessary against outside aggressive elements--

Sixer wasn’t part of the agreement, but he wasn’t supposed to be an _outside aggressive element_ \--

Bill needed to know what to do. He needed to know what Stanley expected. He needed to know, to not break the agreement; to know what to tell Sixer when he asked things like this, what he should or shouldn’t say and how much--

But if Stanley needed him to lie to Sixer, his own brother, then what did that _mean?_

\--That Sixer was an _outside aggressive element_ to _Stanley?!_

No-no-no. That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be right!

He didn’t understand. _He needed to understand--_

“--I, I need to talk to Stanley,” was what came out of Bill’s mouth in response to Sixer’s demand for more information, and he knew immediately after saying it that he’d just made things that much worse.

Because the corners of Sixer’s mouth took a significant downturn, and he--

“No-no wait that’s not what I-- _I--_ ” Bill blurted out, as Sixer’s expression morphed into a narrow-eyed bared-teeth snarl. He felt himself truly begin to panic, his body instinctively kicking his feet against the floorboards to shove the rest of himself back against the porch-post, while his hands tightened at Sixer’s wrists, holding on hard, “-- _wait-WAIT- **WAIT!**_ ”

“--Ford?” he heard come from inside the Shack, and then Stanley and Pine Tree were in the open doorway. “What--” Stanley stopped when he saw them both.

There was a moment of silence, like a brief pause in the world.

And Bill could think of nothing else he could say in front of the both of them, without having it all come out and crash down on him because he might’ve said too much to the wrong person, that he shouldn’t or couldn’t say without risking breaking one thing or the other, other than to blurt out at Stanley, “I’m _trying_ to keep the agreement!”

“-- _What_ agreement!?” Sixer snapped out, and when Bill looked back at Sixer, it made his head feel like there was bad air in it all over again.

Bill opened his mouth. He closed it again. He didn’t know what to do, because… _Sixer didn’t know about the **agreement?!**_

Bill looked back up at Stanley, eyes wide. “...Stanley?” he asked, because _what was going on?!?!?_

And, for one frozen moment, he was absolutely certain that Stanley was going to grab Sixer, literally drag him away, reading him the riot act as he ushered him off, _just like he had in the forest_.

...Except Stanley didn’t do that.

What he did do was keep his eyes on Sixer and say in calm, even, flat tones, ”...Ford. What are you doing?”

Bill stared at Stanley. He felt his breath start to go thready.

‘ _No_ ,’ he thought. ‘ _Why…_ ’ Because he’d done everything _right_ , hadn’t he? --Even if he’d screwed up a little with Pine Tree and Shooting Star, Stanley had said that it was an accident, said that the agreement was still unbroken and in full-force. Even Shooting Star had said that! Everything should have been all right. Stanley should be--

\--but he wasn’t, and--

Bill felt his head drop back against the porch-post behind him again, as he stared.

‘ _...oh. Right._ ’

He’d been expecting Stanley to break the agreement first, hadn’t he?

...So why did it hurt so much?

But it didn’t make sense--!

He’d been trying -- actually _trying_ \-- not even sure _why_ he’d been trying, but _he had been TRYING!!_

‘ _\--why_ now?! _Why not_ before _in the woods?!?_ ’

It didn’t make sense! It didn’t make sense because--

...it didn’t make sense. Because Stanley breaking the agreement _now_ wouldn’t make sense…

Because...

... _was_ Stanley breaking the agreement? Sixer hadn’t actually hit him yet, hadn’t even _tried_ to attack him. Sixer was just holding onto him right now and doing nothing more than _talking_ … so...

‘ _...maybe…_ ’

“--I’m getting some answers!” Sixer spat out. “Since you seem to think that _covering_ for Bill is a good idea! --What did he say to you in the woods?” Sixer demanded ...of Stanley? “--What did you tell my brother?” he snarled in Bill’s face, fists clenching in his shirt even tighter, and Bill’s body winced in response, stupid reflexes! “Did you force him to make a deal with you?! Did you--”

‘ _What?_ ’ “--Not a deal!” Bill gasped out, wide-eyed, startled in the extreme. Because he couldn’t make any proper, binding deals as he was; of course he couldn’t. --How could Sixer not know that?

“ _What did you DO!!?_ ” Sixer yelled at him.

“I didn’t--!” His words were cut off at the full-body flinch he couldn’t help but make as Sixer pulled up on his shirt, taking him almost up off of his feet for a moment, and he stared back at Sixer in shock -- what was _wrong_ with him?! ‘ _Why is Sixer acting like this?! This isn’t how the game is played!_ ’ “The agreement was--” _Stanley’s idea!!_ Bill nearly blurted out, because surely he could share _that_ without it being a problem! But before he could--

“--Bill, stop talking.”

Bill slammed his mouth shut.

“Stanley, he’s not going to--” Sixer said with no small derision in his voice, then stopped talking himself.

Bill was _very_ sure that he didn’t like the way that Sixer was looking at him just then.

He _wanted_ to tell Sixer that he _wasn’t_ choosing Stanley over him -- remind him that they had a deal, that he wouldn’t do that -- that he wouldn’t _have_ to do that -- but he was already a little afraid that maybe he’d miscalculated, and maybe the agreement _wasn’t_ what he’d thought it was.

All he could do was grip Sixer’s wrists a little more tightly with his hands to show him that, even if he wasn’t saying it out loud, he was not letting go; doing the opposite. He didn’t want to let go.

He didn’t want to _choose_. --He shouldn’t _have_ to choose between them! To have only one or the other, but not both. He should be able to have both! --Shouldn’t he? Why not!

 _Why_ had Stanley _lied?_ \-- _Why was Stanley making him choose?!_

And the screaming panic that his body kept tossing at him, the stupid shivering it was doing that wasn’t abating in the slightest, _wasn’t_ helping matters. All the physical stress was starting to become overwhelming -- threatening to rise up the rest of the way, all the way to the top of his head, to swamp over and drown out all rational thought he had left. Bill could _feel_ it beginning to happen already.

It almost felt like he was trapped in the blue fire in Stanley’s mind again, like his mentality was melting down _all over again_...

Bill felt his body struggling again, in a way he didn’t understand, and just like Stanley had told him before, he let it do whatever it wanted to do again, his mind merely along for the ride.

\--Bill gritted his teeth and slammed his head backwards into the porch-post behind him, _hard_.

...And then he laughed and laughed, because it had _worked!_ For a few blissful moments, the shock of the pain radiating out from the hit swamped out _everything else_ \--

\--until it stopped doing that and became a dull throb that made it even harder to concentrate, and everything _came right back_ \--

\--so he stopped laughing and felt his body pull his face into a grimace instead--

\--but in the middle of all that, he’d had a dazed few moments of clarity. _Blissful_ clarity. He’d laughed like a maniac because he’d realized exactly how _stupid_ he was being about everything. Because he’d finally realized what was going on inside his own mind.

He’d thought, abruptly, ‘-- _Wait_.’

He’d thought, ‘ _Why am I even thinking any of this in the first place?_ ’

He’d thought, ‘-- _I have a_ deal _with Sixer._ ’

He’d thought, ‘ _I only have an_ agreement _with Stanley; we didn’t even shake on it!_ ’

He’d thought, ‘ _Why am I having trouble deciding this at all?! This shouldn’t even be a choice!_ ’

Because it shouldn’t even be a choice.

‘ _...Should it?_ ’

Bill’s head was hanging down now, and he was panting from the mental exertion and physical stress -- oh, how he hated being _stuck_ in a human-ish body! -- and he wasn’t feeling weird at all -- his head _hurt_ instead. He _missed_ feeling weird _so much_ …

...and Stanley hadn’t yet told him to stop his stopped-talking...

“Bill, I want you to listen to me very carefully, all right?” Stanley said to him in low, even tones, as he started walking forward towards them, him and Sixer both.

Bill lifted his head and glared at him, because the stopping-silence was over now, and blast the human for making him think he had to choose in the first place! “...I’m listening,” Bill said thinly.

“My brother isn’t your friend, Bill,” Stanley said, and Bill flinched hard in shock. Then he shook his head jerkily, beginning to feel the much more welcome stirrings of anger, instead.

“HAHA!” he laughed out at Stanley, with a wide grin, because was Stanley Pines really trying to get between them? And with a _lie_ , of all things? If so, then Stanley was playing a losing game, there. --Between a deal and an agreement, there was no choice! “Yes, he is -- of course he is!” Bill told him.

“No, I’m not,” Sixer gritted out lowly.

“Shh,” Bill told him, almost absently, only glancing at him briefly, because Stanley was the much larger problem here.

“He’s not your friend,” Stanley told him, and Bill’s body shuddered and his hands tightened their grip on Sixer, for just a moment hitting perfect synchronicity in how completely his body and his mind both utterly rejected the concept entirely. “You get that right?” Stanley told him, circling to the side. “You don’t even have to give him the time of day,” and Bill let out a single hysterical laugh, because--

“--Doesn’t matter, time is dead!” Bill blurted out, shifting his head from side-to-side.

“He’s not your friend,” Stanley repeated calmly for a third time, and Bill had had enough of this -- of being jerked around, of having his body used against him, of Stanley suddenly _lying_ over and over again for no reason when--!

“YES HE IS!” Bill screamed out at him, his grip on Sixer’s wrists tightening even further, because would Stanley try to rip Sixer away from him again? Like in the forest? --He wouldn’t let him do it this time! Not when it left Sixer so angry at their game being interrupted!

“No, I’m not!” Sixer shouted out at him angrily, and Bill couldn’t help but turn his head towards him and snarl at him a little because--

“-- _Not now_ , Sixer!” Bill told him, annoyed in the extreme. “You’re going to confuse Stanley--”

“ _Confuse **Stanley?!?**_ ” Ford repeated. He slammed Bill against the post again, startling the breath out of his lungs, and an odd noise of reaction out of his chest. “ _Stanley_ isn’t the one who is confused, here!” Ford yelled at him. “ _WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME WHEN I TELL YOU--!!_ ”

Stanley put a hand on Sixer’s shoulder, and Bill snarled out “NO!” and pulled Sixer by the wrists in closer to him -- he _wasn’t_ going to let go. Sixer let out an odd noise at Bill’s possessiveness, and Bill braced himself with his body’s legs, body at a slight angle, his back against the porch-post, readying himself to pull Sixer back when Stanley tried to do the opposite, but Stanley...

...didn’t try to pull Sixer away from him. All he did was stand next to them both and say, “Ford, _breathe_.”

“Stan-ley--” Sixer began.

“Just. breathe.”

Bill eyed Stanley with no small suspicion, and curled his hands around Sixer’s wrists further in a stronger, harder-to-break hold, as Stanley looked back at him, and Sixer breathed for awhile without saying a word.

“Bill--” Stanley began.

“--He’s _MINE_ ,” Bill told him, eyes narrowed to slits. He slid his arms over Sixer’s for extra bracing, just in case; Sixer’s forearms were almost flush against his chest, now, by the grip Bill had on his wrists, in-close. It would be almost impossible for Stanley to pull Sixer away, now -- all he’d do was pull Bill along, too.

Stanley stopped talking for a bit.

Bill kept watching him.

“Bill,” Stanley began again, in the same tone of voice as before. “ _Why_ do you think Ford is your friend?”

“ _Because we are!_ ” Bill told him, annoyed in the extreme. “We have a deal!”

Stanley was frowning slightly.

“You only make deals with friends?” Stanley said.

“Haha, no!” Bill told him, surprised, because what-the- _what?_ That wasn’t how it worked!

“...When you make a deal with someone, they become your friend?” Stanley said.

“ _No!_ ” Was he playing stupid on purpose?! “I mean, _Stanley_ , that we have a deal! _It’s our deal!_ ” he told him. “--Sixer lets me into his mind, and we’re friends until the end of time! That’s the deal!”

Silence fell on the porch.

“...I put a metal plate in my head to keep you out,” Sixer said out loud, to Bill, slowly.

Bill turned towards him and looked at him. “So?”

Sixer took in a breath, like he was trying for... patience?

“I put a _metal plate_... in my _head_... to **keep you out** ,” Sixer repeated.

Bill cocked his head at Sixer. “Yeah, Sixer, I kind of _noticed?_ ” he told Sixer with a frown. “Is today the day for stating the obvious?” he grinned at him.

Sixer made an odd, strangled noise for some reason, and Stanley let out a breath and said, “Bill, does Ford putting a metal plate in his head break the deal?”

“No,” he told Stanley, puzzled. “Why would it?”

“You can’t get in his head anymore,” Stanley pointed out.

Tch. “That’s not because of the metal plate,” Bill told him, and Stanley should know that from the Fearamid -- shaking hands was enough even with the metal plate in! “That’s because--” _...oh. Right._ Now he saw what Stanley was getting at. “--That’s temporary,” he told Stanley. “This… whole _thing_ ,” Bill looked down at himself and grimaced, “is temporary. I’ll figure it out soon enough!” he grinned up at him. “No reason to stop being friends in the meantime!” he said brightly, starting to feel a bit more relaxed.

...And why wouldn’t he? He had Sixer close-by -- right in his grasp, no less! He and Sixer weren’t fighting -- unlike what Stanley had ‘warned him about’ earlier, the _liar_ \-- and Sixer wasn’t even shouting all that much anymore. Everything was great!

“Time is dead,” Bill heard Pine Tree say, off to their right, and he glanced over that way.

“Yes, it is. I just said that. What’s your point?” Bill said, without a clue where the kid was going with this.

“Your deal’s until the end of time,” Pine Tree said.

“...Wow, _really_ , Pine Tree? How dumb are you?” Bill rolled his eyes, finally getting what the kid was confused about. “Time being _DEAD_ doesn’t mean it’s _ENDED_ ,” he told the kid. “We haven’t _run out_ of the stuff yet. There’s still plenty of it to shift around and control the flow of, especially in dimensions like this one! HAHA!”

Pine Tree frowned up at him, then looked away.

Then his eyes narrowed.

“Dipper…” Shooting Star said quietly, and Pine Tree sent her a look before grabbing the brim of his hat and looking back up at Bill again.

Bill tilted his head at him.

“Gotta question for me, kid?” he asked -- more of a rhetorical statement really -- while wondering what it was going to be.

“Great-Uncle Ford’s deal is still… going on,” Pine Tree said.

“Yes,” Bill agreed.

“But ours isn’t,” Pine Tree said. “So what’s different--”

“--No,” said Bill.

Pine Tree stopped. “...What?” he breathed out.

“No,” Bill said. “Our deal’s still on.”

“-- _Bill?_ ” he heard Sixer say, startled, and Bill sent him an amused look.

“What are you acting all suprised about? You know I make deals with other people, and I saw Pine Tree tell you about the sock puppet thing before you put up the barrier around the Shack,” he told Sixer. “Didn’t you ever ask him for all the juicy _details?_ ”

...Wow, the look on Sixer’s face! He hadn’t seen _that_ particular look since Dimension 23-x, when Sixer had been trying to transport all those ‘poor, unfortunate alien refugees’ to another planet, and hadn’t realized that all his fancy flying hadn’t amounted to squat because one of those stray laser weapon shots had grazed the side of the back-hold!

Sixer had flown all the way to the next star system and actually landed on the planet, disembarked and gone around the back and lowered the ramp, all before opening the airlock to see that all that had been left of the people that he’d been trying to save had been… yeah, _that_ was the look, HAHA!

And Pine Tree was starting to look panicked, too.

“You--!!” Sixer began, and Bill grinned, because _he smelled weakness_.

“Ford. Bill.” Stanley had a hand on each of their shoulders, now, and Bill was staring at the offending appendage like it was a personal affront, because it _was_.

“Stop touching me,” he told Stanley, and the only reason he didn’t immediately try and remove it was because he’d have to let go of Sixer to do it.

Stanley gave him a long look, then slowly removed it. But he did remove it.

“Stop attacking the kids,” he said.

“Who’s attacking them?” Bill said, letting out a laugh.

“Stop _threatening_ them,” Stanley corrected, not looking all that happy with him.

Like Bill cared. “Oh, c’mon Stanley,” he said, with no small amusement. “Who’s being threatening? I _probably_ can’t repossess and puppet Pine Tree’s body around… _right this second_ ,” he added, and he grinned when he glanced over and all-but- _felt_ the fright-filled idea _catch_ inside Pine Tree’s skull, the kid’s reaction was so strong and visible. “But hey, I’m definitely looking _forward_ to--”

“ _NO!!_ ” both Sixer and Pine Tree yelled out in sheer horror, and Bill cackled out a long laugh.

“Bill,” Stanley said in warning tones, not that Bill cared. He was having far too much fun.

“You’re lying!” Pine Tree said. “I-- I’m _fine_ , and we won, and--!”

“You _won?_ ” Bill said, his eyes going wide. Then Bill remembered what Pine Tree had said on the roof of the Shack, right before they’d made their deal, about how he’d thought he’d ‘defeated him’ in Stanley’s sleeping mind, and…

Bill slowly looked over at Shooting Star, because…

“Is this a _whole-family_ problem, then?” he asked her directly, grinning, and she _flinched_.

“Mabel saw your note!” Pine Tree said adamantly, and Bill kept grinning at her, as she got more and more pale, as her sibling kept talking, and she was obviously remembering what he’d told her earlier, just a few minutes ago, and putting two and two together to get a lot more than four. “I didn’t die! We _stopped_ you! -- _You lost!_ ”

Bill cackled out another laugh again at the last.

“RIGHT!” Bill yelled out happily. “Oh, WOW, Pine Tree, boy did I ever LOSE! I mean, look at me, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!” he said, nearly giggling with glee, and Sixer was twitching in his grip for some reason. “BOY, did I ever NOT get the rift, and NOT get out of my old decaying dimension, and NOT just get Gideon to make a deal with me on something else later, and NOT--”

“ _ **Bill**_ ,” Stanley ground out, but it was already too late, because Shooting Star was hugging her brother, and they were talking to each other quickly under their breath, and--

Bill was grinning up a storm as Pine Tree demanded shakily, “--Undo it!”

“HMMMMMMMMMMM?” Bill hummed out, looking down at Pine Tree with amusement.

“Let him go, Bill!” Sixer demanded, pulling him forward a bit, leveraging Bill’s tight hold, and Bill glanced up at him briefly with a sly smirk.

“... _Dipper_ ,” Shooting Star said under her breath, and she looked worried. --Probably because she had some idea of what her sibling was screwing up for himself.

‘ _Too late! Better luck next time, Shooting Star!_ ’

He saw the moment that Pine Tree finally got there, with the _only_ thing on his mind being--

“--Bill, the deal’s off!” Pine Tree blurted out shakily, staring straight up at him, desperate as anything.

Bill drew in a quick excited breath -- he couldn’t help it -- because suddenly he felt like his old self again, for just a moment. And, for just that moment, he could _feel_ all the strings attaching them again -- and felt all the strings attaching them through the deal... _waver_.

And instead of trying to hang onto them… Bill _let go_.

The odd sort of empty feeling inside, left behind as they unravelled and dissipated, had his whole body relaxing and his eyelids dropping low.

Because he’d gotten away with it.

“ _Suuuuure_ , Pine Tree...” Bill purred out, a truly pleased grin slithering its way across his face, and the look of disbelief Pine Tree got when he said it was good, but what was going to come next was going to be even better, Bill knew.

“W-wait. Just, like that?” Pine Tree said unsteadily, rocking back on his heels, clutching at his own arms.

“Mm-hmm,” Bill said, his grin getting wider. “Just. like. **that.** ”

Pine Tree started to frown slightly, slowly straightening up. Then his expression started to clear slightly.

“What was your end of the deal,” Bill heard Stanley ask him, and he shot Stanley a sideways look and a truly wicked grin.

“-- _All the secrets of the universe_ ,” Bill purred out.

He glanced back in time to see the look he was expecting to see on Pine Tree’s face: shocked disbelief.

The quiet gasp he heard from Sixer was almost as good.

But something even better was coming.

“You liar!” Pine Tree said. “You never--!”

Oh, and this was the _best part_. Bill _loved_ this part -- when the smart ones realized just how very badly they’d just outsmarted themselves.

“--Every question you asked me answered, truthfully,” Bill said with no small satisfaction. “-- _While the deal was on_.” Bill gave him a large toothy grin. “Too bad you didn’t ask me very many, isn’t it?”

“I--” Pine Tree got a bit of a wide-eyed almost horrified look, as he must have began to remember the few questions he _had_ asked Bill, and what Bill had said in response, that he obviously hadn’t had to share.

Like ‘why are you doing this?!’ -- why he’d grabbed Pine Tree’s body as his puppet:

_Look kid, you've been getting way too close to figuring out some major answers. I've got big plans comin' and I don't need you gettin' in my way. Destroying that laptop was a cinch. Now I just need to destroy your journal._

And a few things he’d shared without even a prompting question:

_Welcome to the Mindscape, kid! Without a vessel to possess, you're basically a ghost!_

_This isn't the last you'll hear of me! Big things are coming! You can't stop me!_

Bill waited, eyes wide and alight with glee, because sometimes the anticipation was the best part… before the best part, HAHA!

“--You left!” Pine Tree said, voice shaking with some volatile mix of emotions Bill couldn’t name offhand. “I couldn’t ask you--!”

“--Pine Tree, I’m a busy guy,” Bill told him blandly, then grinned. “But hey, it’s too bad you didn’t know anybody who’s seen how my summoning ritual goes,” he glanced over at Shooting Star, grinning, “so that you could just _CALL ME UP_ to ask me questions whenever you wanted -- OH, WAIT…” Bill said, then started cackling at the _look_ on Pine Tree’s face, because THIS was what he _LIVED_ for, really!

...Not that the ‘say my name three times’ thing wouldn’t have worked -- it would have, too -- but Sixer had written that one into his third little journal in invisible ink, and Pine Tree hadn’t gotten through the whole thing to find and read about _that_ until a bit later. ...But the summoning ritual Gideon had used? Shooting Star and Question Mark had seen that one _weeks_ before!

“HAHAHA! Too bad you thought it was a _GREAT_ idea to give all that up, Pine Tree!” Bill crowed out. “I mean, I can’t even take advantage of _MY_ end of the deal right now, and you get rid of it while I’m _RIGHT HERE_ and all easy-access?” Bill tipped his head back and started laughing all over again. “--I mean, _now_ I don’t even have to… what was that thing you were saying before, Stanley? _Give you the time of day when you ask for it?_ HAHAHAHAHA!”

Pine Tree’s chin was tilted down, his shoulders looked a little low.

“Congratulations, kid,” he heard Stanley say to him blandly. “You just outsmarted a thirteen-year-old. Guess who already outsmarted _you_ already, and you don’t even know it yet?”

“...Huh?” Bill said, turning his head towards Stanley. “Who?” He frowned. People didn’t outsmart him often. “You?” Stanley had gotten him in the Fearamid. Had Stanley set something up here, too, somehow?

“Nah, not me,” said Stanley. “The same thirteen-year-old.”

Bill blinked at him.

He glanced over at Pine Tree.

Bill saw Pine Tree’s head come up again.

Bill saw his shoulders get a little more square.

And he had an odd glint in his eyes that Bill hadn’t seen in them before.

Bill frowned.

“Great-Uncle Ford,” he heard Pine Tree say, “Tell him the deal’s off.”

Bill blinked at this pronouncement from the kid.

And then he burst out laughing again, loud and long.

He was practically hanging off of Sixer by the time he was able to catch half-a-proper-breath again.

“WOO!” Bill let out. “Boy, did I need that! HAHAHA!” He let out another breath, and pushed his hair out of his face, one-handed, his left hand grasped in the lapel of Sixer’s longcoat firmly, and Bill could hardly find him in him to care that his body had been doing things instinctively on him again, as he got his feet more solidly under him and straightened in place, still leaning against Sixer a little. “Oh, oh WOW. That is HILARIOUS!”

“...Why,” Pine Tree said slowly.

“AHAHA! Are you KIDDING me?” Bill said, grinning down at the kid. “Pine Tree,” he began with much bemusement, “It’s FUNNY because you think that Sixer doesn’t want to be friends with me!” Bill told him, grinning down at him. “ _Nice try_ , kid, but Sixer’s NEVER gonna--”

“--Bill, the deal’s off,” he heard Sixer breathe out shakily, and Bill stopped abruptly, grin becoming fixed-frozen in place.

He felt the strings from the deal between them, felt them vibrate--

\--and he clamped down on them all, **HARD**.

Held them all in place.

Did **NOT** let go of any of them.

He slowly turned his head towards Sixer.

“... _What?_ ” Bill said, nonplussed, because was Sixer just _testing_ him? That had to be it, right?

Sixer seemed to gather himself up a bit more.

“Bill,” he said, a bit more firmly. “The deal’s off.”

Bill felt his head drop and his eyes widen as those same strings _shook_ this time, and he barely kept ahold of them this time.

He felt his grip on Sixer’s longcoat tighten in unconscious similar reaction.

He felt the grin slide straight off of his face, as he was barely able to stabilize everything again, tamp down all the vibrations and settle everything back to the way it should be.

Sixer… was _serious_. He had to be. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t _meant_ \--

Bill felt his breathing go a little off at the thought. His eyes widened further, then narrowed. Blinked closed--

\--Bill blinked his eyes open again as he shoved the thought away quickly, abruptly, and tipped his head back to look up at Sixer again, instead. Because it had to be some sort of mistake, didn’t it? Sixer didn’t know what he was doing, clearly, or how serious it was. --He always _did_ push the boundaries of their friendship, didn’t he? So Bill would just have to explain it to him.

“...That’s **NOT** funny, Sixer,” Bill told him flatly, using his grip on Sixer’s longcoat to straighten to his full height, dead serious, because _it wasn’t funny_. “Stop playing around.”

“I’m not playing,” Sixer told him firmly, looking down at him, dead in the eye.

Bill’s eyes narrowed. “Neither am I,” he told Sixer. “Don’t do that again. I won’t be able to--”

“--Won’t be able to _what?_ ” Sixer interjected, and Bill frowned up at him.

“...To keep the deal intact,” he told Sixer, because why had he interrupted? At the raised-eyebrows look he got from Sixer at what he’d said, one that looked a lot like disbelief, Bill added, “I’m serious. Don’t do it. I’m _not_ playing around right now.”

“Grunkle Ford…” Shooting Star said, voice wavering.

“--Well, _that_ would be a first!” Sixer almost snarled out at him, but he had an odd sort of wide-eyed look going on for some reason that Bill didn’t really understand.

“Ford,” Stanley said, “Be careful.”

“ _ **Careful?!**_ ” Sixer said in rising tones. “ _You want me to be--_ ” and then he began to laugh. And laugh. _And laugh_. It left Bill staring.

“...What ...are you…” Bill was confused. This wasn’t meshing up inside his head, and he couldn't figure out… “Why… are you laughing?”

He stared up at Sixer as Sixer finally stopped laughing and stared right back down at him.

“...Sixer?” Bill began slowly, but at this point he wasn’t even really all that sure what he was even asking. “What...”

“-- _Bill, **the deal’s off!**_ ” Sixer shouted out at him, eyes shining with a crazed sort of delight, and--

\--every last string of the deal just _disappeared_ all-at-once.

Bill’s body jerked slightly in reaction, and his eyes flew completely open in shock.

He couldn’t hold onto any of it. He hadn’t been able to; it hadn’t been possible. Because...

Three-times-repeated. In the presence of witnesses. Said to the holder of the bargain-threads. Him.

 _It was all **gone**_.

He felt his face go expressionless.

The hand he had fisted in Sixer’s longcoat slowly loosened, lost its hold, then fell to limply swing at his side. He swayed on his feet.

Bill didn’t really feel it, though; he couldn’t really feel _anything_ in the aftermath of…

It was a little like being back in the Mindscape again, except that he was in a physical body; that had weight, a sort-of dragging-down effect on his mind, his self. But his body felt numb; there was no sensation registering from it just then.

And the only thing Bill could think to say at that point, as he stared blankly up at Sixer, was, “ _Why_.”

Because he didn’t understand. Because up until Sixer had done it, Bill hadn’t actually thought it _possible_ that Sixer would… that Sixer _could_... that Sixer would ever _want_ to...

(...It would occur to Bill much later that, given the nature of the deal and the specific wording of it, he likely hadn’t been truly _capable_ of questioning it while he’d been bound by it. Not until after he’d been freed from it, again.)

“‘Why’?” Sixer echoed, staring down at him. He gave out a shaky laugh as Bill stared up at him. “ _WHY?!?_ ”

He grabbed Bill with both hands and slammed him backwards into the porch-post again. It barely registered to Bill beyond a shaking in his vision.

“--Ford!!” Stanley called out, but Sixer shoved him off with a hand.

“No!” Sixer said, looking away to his side, then back down at Bill, who he still had captured by a single strong fist in the center of his shirt. “You-- you want to know _why?!?_ ” His voice got higher-pitched. “ _ **YOU RUINED MY LIFE!**_ ”

Bill stared up at him blankly, uncomprehending.

This seemed to make Sixer only angrier. “You-- I spent _thirty years_ running for my life!!” Sixer yelled at him. “Thirty years of running, and trying to find a way back home--”

“...Ford…” Stanley said in strained tones.

“--and trying to find a way to survive, and trying to find a way to _kill you for good!_ And you-- you treated it all like a _game!!_ ” Sixer shrieked at him. “You sent _bounty hunters_ after me, in dimension after dimension after dimension, and you kept _messing with me_ when I fell asleep, jumping in and--” Sixer choked. “A-and even after I finally managed to get a metal plate surgically inserted into my head, in order to keep you out of my Mindscape, you _still kept showing up in my dreams!_ Acting like nothing was wrong! Acting like--” Sixer’s voice was shaking now.

In his peripheral vision, Bill saw Stanley try to step in close to Sixer, hand outstretched, but Sixer flinched away violently, shaking his head, and Stanley stopped in-place and lowered his hand.

Bill stared.

“--You _lied_ to me and _betrayed_ me, and nearly drove me to the brink of _insanity_ with the portal, and you played cat-and-mouse games with me and _tortured_ me during Weirdmageddon, and you-- you have the _audacity_ to stand there and ask me _why I don’t want to be friends with you?!?!_ ” Sixer yelled at him.

“But…” Bill said quietly, then stopped. Because something wasn’t right about this.

“‘But’? But _what_ , Bill?” Sixer said, looking irate, eyes wide. “ _But what?_ \--What could you _possibly_ have to say that could change my mind on any of this _at all?!?_ ” Sixer let out a short bark of a laugh. “Because I’d really, truly _love_ to hear it!!” he ended sarcastically. “Really, I _would!!_ ”

“I… was…” Bill felt himself start to frown, though, because... he’d been... “trying to…” give Sixer what he’d wanted.

...Hadn’t he?

Weirdness, and never-ending adventure.

A gateway to other worlds, dimensional travel to places beyond his wildest imagining where he would learn more than he ever could stuck in his home dimension.

A game of hero versus villain, because didn’t Sixer want to be a hero? To be somebody worth something _more_ than just… someone immersed in mediocrity? To be doing things that no-one else could or would do?

And it had been no trouble at all to oblige that, to accommodate that, had it? Not when Bill was who he was.

...But why would he do all that for Sixer?

“We’re…” Bill started to say, then trailed off again. He lowered his chin, dropped his head, and an odd noise escaped him and he felt something like a flinch or a twitching jerk when he tried to say ‘ _friends_ ’.

Because why _would_ he do that? All that? _Any_ of that? ...Because they were ‘friends’??

Sixer had ranted at him about revenge on more than one occasion, had actually managed to construct a weapon that could, conceivably, _actually kill him_ \--

\-- _and then had shot him with it_ \--

\--and he’d thought it was _cute?!?_ Thought it was _amusing?!_ Thought it was _funny_ even?!?!?!

Bill wouldn’t allow that sort of behavior from any of his friends, not even the _Henchmaniacs!_

He should have killed Sixer the very first time he tried anything. He would have, if it had been anyone -- or any _thing_ \-- else.

The _very first time_ Sixer had been there, in person, in the flesh, and seriously tried anything in a move against him, he should have _at least_ \--

No. Something wasn’t right about _any_ of this.

Bill raised a hand to his head and blinked. Blinked again. His frown got deeper.

How many times had Sixer threatened him? And how many times had he just… let it go? Ignored it? _Not_ killed him?

\--Yes, Sixer was part of his Zodiac, but Bill couldn’t even remember _contemplating_ the _possibility_ of killing him for any of his various offenses! -- _And there were a lot of them!!_

Bill raised his other hand to his head, too, and started pushing inwards with both of them, because... _\--Why had he spent so much time on Sixer, at all?_ He was just one human! One single, solitary human -- barely able to challenge him even with thirty years preparation going for him and no strong interference -- and even being part of the Zodiac wasn’t enough to explain that, because he’d spent far-and-away more of his time on watching and interacting with and talking to Sixer than any other Zodiac member -- than _all_ of the other Zodiac members _combined_.

Bill was staring down at the floorboards almost sightlessly, and he was really starting to feel a little horrified, because _what had he been doing all this time?!?!_ These last thirty-five years--

...

\--he couldn’t connect anything he’d done or decided regarding Sixer to anything approaching logical thought!

Yes, Bill hated and broke Rules on a regular basis, and chaos was his wheelhouse, but there were Rules, and there was internal consistency, and those were two _very_ different things! He still had _reasons_ for what he did! He still had internal structures and strictures that he followed, and when he deviated from them, he always had a reason why -- even if it was nothing more than ‘I don’t feel like doing it that way today’ or ‘because I’m bored’!

But the only thing he could come up with for Sixer, over and over again, as a reason why, was ‘he’s my friend’, ‘he’s my friend’, and he didn’t-couldn't-wouldn’t let his friends get away with any things like that -- _that didn’t explain anything at all!_

“Nothing to say for yourself, Bill?” he heard Sixer say. “That would be a first!”

Bill closed his eyes and pressed in on the sides of his head harder.

This wasn’t right. Because, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that...

“You’re… not my friend...” Bill said slowly, and he wasn’t sure afterwards whether he’d said it as more of a question or as a statement, but the response he got from Sixer had been extreme and immediate.

“-- _We were never friends_ , you stupid triangle!!” Sixer spat out, and that had Bill snapping his head up and his eyes open and saying:

“What?”

“Ford--!” Stanley said.

“No, Stanley!” Sixer protested. “If this is the only way to _really_ get through to him, once and for all, then--!” He turned back to Bill.

“ _We were never friends!_ ” Sixer repeated. “Get that through your stupid head!”

In something close to shock, Bill stared up at ~~Sixer--~~ Ford-- Stanford Pines.

“We’re not friends, we never were, and _we never will be!_ ” Bill was told. “And if you’ve _ever_ thought differently, then you’re the most gullible, idiotic, _foolish_ individual that I’ve _ever_ encountered in _any_ dimension I’ve ever traveled in, in this world or any other!”

Stanley might’ve said something under his breath, but Bill couldn’t hear it.

“You--” Bill felt his hands slowly dropping back to his sides, as he stared at the human in front of him like he was truly seeing him for the first time in… he wasn’t sure how long -- if he ever had before. How badly had he blinded himself and his own all-seeing eye to things, that he’d let his idea of the Zodiac members as _important_ override his good sense for long enough, that--?

\--that this _human_ had managed to trick him into thinking that he was anything more than--

\--than--

\--than...

And, with no small horror, Bill said, finally, “...You’re not any different than the rest of them.”

And he wasn’t. It was obvious now. Bill wasn’t sure why he hadn’t seen it before.

None of the other Stanfords had ever wanted to be his friend. And none of the other Stanfords had ever hesitated to think of him as, or call him, stupid.

Those were really the _only_ two things that had set this Stanford apart from the rest of them, and now--

And now…

 _And now he knew better_.

“You lied.” And now Bill was feeling the stirrings of anger, because _how dare he--!_ “You _LIED_ to me!” Even the other Stanfords had never dared to _lie_ to him about whether they were _friends_ or not! None of them had ever _lied_ to him at all! They’d never felt the need to! Never even tried! Never _bothered_ to try! --Not least of which because they knew he could read their minds to know if they did! They’d always been completely straightforward in what they’d thought of him, no matter how ugly it was!

Ford was grinning at him.

“Ford--” Stanley said, sounding worried.

“That’s right, Bill,” Ford told him, still grinning. “I _lied_ to you.” He said it like he was almost savoring the word. “How does that make you _feel?_ ”

Hands clenched into fists at his sides, Bill was angry, and getting angrier. And he literally did not know what he wanted -- _needed_ \-- to articulate first.

All that managed to make it out of his stupid human-ish throat in the meantime was an inarticulate and unparseable garble of sound.

For some reason, this only made Ford’s grin larger.

Bill was nearly vibrating in place now, and _this_ sort of bodily shaking he recognized -- nothing like whatever had been happening to him before.

If he’d still been a triangle, he’d have been fully red, and well on his way to black at this point.

“And you know what else, Bill?” Ford taunted him.

“-- _What_ ,” Bill spat back.

“Ford, quit while you’re ahead!!” Stanley said, starting to sound a little frantic.

“Oh, I’m not done yet,” Ford told his sibling. “Not even close.” He let out a huff of laughter and turned back to Bill. “We aren’t just ‘not friends’, Bill -- we’re _enemies_ ,” Ford told him, while Stanley cursed under his breath. “--You do know what an ‘ _enemy_ ’ is, don’t you Bill?” Ford said almost sing-song, talking down to him like he was some kind of child.

“ _Yes_ ,” Bill seethed.

“And do you know what I do to enemies, Bill?” Ford said next.

Bill’s eyes narrowed.

\---

...He didn’t stand a chance.

Ford was bigger than him, stronger than him, faster than him, and knew how to fight. Bill couldn’t use magic inside the barrier, wasn’t used to being human, was barely used to moving around in his new physical form, and Stan knew full well -- from the whole ‘magic circle fiasco’ out in the yard with him the week prior -- that Bill didn’t know how to fight when he wasn’t effectively invincible and able to shrug off most physical damage at large.

So within a span of seconds, and before Stan could so much as think of intervening, Bill had got himself flattened across the floorboards of the porch, with at least a handful more bumps and bruises than he’d had a couple seconds earlier, for his trouble. Because despite being completely outclassed by his brother, Bill had still fought back _anyway_ ...and had gotten hit at least a few more times than he may have been otherwise, if he hadn’t.

Ford didn’t waste any time, once he had Bill down, snarling and restrained. He pulled out two large blocky chunks of metal and snapped them together around one of Bill’s wrists, and then did the same with Bill’s other wrist.

Stan couldn't help but wince as Ford shoved Bill’s head into the floorboards hard for good measure, as he was pushing himself to his knees again. --And as far as Stan was concerned, that was enough of that.

Stan stepped forward, got an hand under Ford’s armpit, and all but dragged him upright, up off and away from the kid.

“Ford--” he began to protest, but his brother shrugged off his hold, hard, and turned back to the kid.

Stanley clenched his jaw, because since when was his brother supposed to be the one acting like an idiot, of the pair of them?

“Just so you don’t misunderstand,” he listened to Ford tell Bill, as Ford leaned over the kid. “Because I would just _hate_ for there to be any more _misunderstandings_ between us,” and Stanley was beginning to hate seeing that specific smile on Ford’s face, which he only seemed to get when he was messing with the kid. “The _only_ reason I am not simply shooting you dead to be done with it,” he heard Ford say, “is because I’m not entirely sure that it will _take_.”

Bill glared up at him from his prone position on the wooden floorboards, and Stan didn't blame him. Stan was glaring at the back of his brother's head, himself.

“Once I figure out an alternative working power source for my quantum destabilizer, that won’t be a problem anymore,” Ford continued, straightening again and brushing himself off.

Bill eyed him but didn’t move. “That so,” Stan heard Bill say calmly and without inflection, and it set off warning bells in Stan’s head.

“Yes,” Ford told him flatly, and Stan wondered, ‘ _Quantum destabilizer?_ ’ Because what was that supposed to be?

...Something that made not being able to shoot Bill dead no longer a problem?

‘ _Oh. Oh no--_ ’

It was official -- Stan was gonna have to read Ford the riot act later. He should really know better than to antagonize the kid, especially after what had just happened. Because with their deal off--

\--no, _even worse than that_ , with Ford having finally made it clear to the kid _that they were now **enemies**_...

Stan grimaced as he watched Ford get _that smile_ again. He frowned when he heard Ford say, “In any event, these should serve nicely in the meantime.”

“...Ford,” Stanley said slowly. “...What did you just do?”

“Oh, _well_ Stanley,” Ford began with no small amount of sarcasm, “I’m so _very_ glad you asked! You see,” he continued, “since there seems to be some sort of… _uncertainty_ in exactly what magic Bill may-or-may-not be able to cast at-present,” he glared at Stan, “I thought it prudent to remove the possibility from the situation entirely.”

“Ford,” Stan repeated, because that had not helped him understand things _at all_. “What did you just do. _In small words._ ”

“I’ve neutralized him,” said Ford.

“What?” Because what the heck did _that_ mean?

“...He made it so that there’s no way I can defend myself from anything,” he heard Bill say slowly, and hey, at least the kid was able to explain it to him! ...Not that _that_ was a surprise, given the past week and a half or so of living with the kid, but it would’ve been nice if his own brother could have managed to make at least a lick of sense for a change, for once.

...Wait, though. That wasn’t good. If the kid couldn’t defend himself…

Stan pulled in a breath. He’d made it a point to make it clear to the kid that self-defense was okay -- it was just overreacting to people, or starting a fight in the first place, that he’d told the kid would be a problem if the kid did either one. He didn’t want someone hurting the kid, just as much as he didn’t want the kid hurting someone else -- and with the way the last couple days had been going, he had a feeling that so long as the kid didn’t misinterpret what was going on around him or to him, the kid was actually pretty unlikely to be the initial instigator in most cases.

They had something that was about as close to a deal as possible going on with this ‘mutual nonaggression agreement’ that they were still hammering all the details out on. (Apparently, calling it a ‘truce’ meant something different, that they wouldn’t also have each others’ backs or something -- that, if something happened, it’d be okay to just look on and do nothing but laugh while bad things went down for the other person. Stan kind of liked the ‘covering each other’s backs’ idea a _lot_ better, thanks.)

Stan had almost said something to Ford about it all, earlier, when he was just starting to work it out with the kid on the evening of the second day. But, he’d worried that Ford might sabotage the agreement if he knew about it, intentionally or otherwise.

He hadn’t tried to _include_ Ford in the agreement -- he’d told the kid outright that he didn’t want Ford to be part of the agreement, demanded that anything between the two of them stay separate, which the kid had all-too-easily agreed to -- because Stan knew the bad blood between Ford and the triangle would likely have his brother breaking it sooner rather than later, and then leave the kids wide-open to attack. The whole point of the agreement was to give the kids -- Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy -- some safety when dealing with the somewhat-feral kid they were all currently living with.

\--And it was working. That morning, the kid had stomped into the forest to cool off, instead of continuing to mix it up with the niblings. From what he knew of this ‘Nightmare Realm’ place from the kid and what the kid had told him about challenges, about how the triangle demon had usually handled things there, this was a big deal. The kid had _stopped_ in the middle of a fight, _turned his back on the niblings_ and just _walked away_. The fact that he had done _any_ of those things would be a big deal, but all three? This was huge, a _huge_ step forward for the kid, in how they were all interacting with each other.

Oddly -- or maybe not-so-oddly, with how likely the kid was turning out to be at being the initial instigator of things, for anything that wasn’t some gross misunderstanding or accident -- the kid been pretty on-board with almost all of what Stan was working out with him as part of the agreement, once they’d handled the initial communication gap and word-choice issues. (...ever-prevalent and low-level teenaged-ish grumbling about anything and everything aside, that is, but Stan was used to seeing that from the likes of the Valentino kid, and sometimes Wendy. No news there.)

Not only that, but one thing the kid didn’t seem to realize was that this agreement of theirs was turning out to be a hell of a lot more flexible and wide-ranging than anything he’d likely ever made an actual deal over -- from what little Stan knew, at least. And the thing that Stan had absolutely been taking full advantage of to the hilt was that, whether the kid actually meant to or not, the kid was taking the agreement as seriously as he did his ‘deals’ -- if not moreso.

For one thing, the kid was actually hesitant to break their agreement. Apparently, he’d broken deals himself before, on little more than a whim or boredom.

For another, Stan himself wasn’t part of the agreement, but the kid had been practically treating him like he was covered by it anyway, because he was the one trying to enforce it -- especially on his family’s side. That in and of itself spoke volumes to Stan.

And what had happened just then out on the porch was even more proof of how seriously the kid had been taking it all.

Stan hadn’t meant to push the kid so hard. He hadn’t realized he’d done it until he’d come out on the porch, and tried to figure out what was going on, and saw the look of utter betrayal from the kid when he didn’t intervene in what was going on between him and Ford immediately.

The kid had thought he was going to help him because of the agreement. Just like he had in the woods. And when Stan hadn’t tried to step between them this time...

...the kid should have completely lost it. The kid _should_ have accused him of lying, breaking the agreement, not keeping to his word about what ‘kids his age’ should be given in terms of safety. But instead...

...he’d seen the kid claw himself back from the brink with nothing more than a week’s-old promise from a con-man’s lips, with no guarantee at all that Stan was still going to enforce the agreement. He’d seen everything, read every emotion that had flickered across the kid’s face like flipping pages in a book. The kid had had nothing beyond blind faith in the thought that _the reason Stan wasn’t intervening was because the agreement didn’t require it, and that the kid was understanding the situation wrong_.

...Granted, it wasn’t like it hadn’t been true. It had been. (Stan hadn’t tried to get in the middle of them right away because Ford hadn’t quite gone too far yet, and he’d hoped he’d be able to bring his brother back from the edge and calm him the heck down before things went too far.) But, the kid had had no basis for making that leap whatsoever.

The kid hadn’t started pushing the boundaries of their agreement until later, not-quite threatening the kids outright in a sort of not-so-passive kinda-aggressive tit-for-tat response, when he’d thought Stan had been lying to him about Ford being his friend. --Lying to _him_ , not to Ford. Apparently, lying to Ford for the kid’s benefit -- in the hopes that Ford wouldn’t go after him with a gun post-haste -- had been what had freaked the kid out so badly right at the start. Finding out that he’d been keeping things like the agreement from Ford had freaked the kid out even worse.

He hadn’t meant to push the kid so hard. He hadn’t realized it might be a problem. He hadn’t realized _how_ big a problem the conflict between ‘being Ford’s friend’ and ‘keeping to the agreement’ might be inside the kid’s head, until the kid had practically concussed himself on that porch post, and started laughing like he was going insane.

And lying to Ford had got him there. The idea of lying to Ford had gotten the kid stuck.

Ford had always insisted that the triangle had lied to him and betrayed him with what had happened with the portal, and now Stan had to really start to wonder where all the lines had actually been drawn.

Seeing the kid seem to get his mind back after Ford canceled out their deal had been scary. He hadn’t realized what a literal wall the kid had been beating his brain up against, there -- not until Dipper had joined in on things to help him sound it out, and get free of the triangle himself. From the looks of things, the kid had seemed to have been literally _unable_ to think of Ford as anything other than a friend, from the deal they’d had going -- and Ford himself didn’t seem to have realized that.

And that… could have been very dangerous, but also very useful. If Ford himself had explained to the kid what ‘being a friend’ meant to him, in some other way than whatever weird concept of it the triangle had had in his own head… would the kid have tried to follow it, trying to give ‘his friend Sixer’ what he wanted? Would he have been capable of doing anything else?

Had his brother even realized what level of influence and control he’d potentially had over the kid at any point during their deal? What he’d just given up?

...From his brother’s eagerness to make the kid believe that they were enemies, not friends, and from the look his brother had on his face right now and all that Ford had said earlier, Stan was pretty sure that his brother didn’t have a clue.

And what was worst about it all? Was that Stan was actually torn between breathing a sigh of relief for the kid, for finally having his head screwed on halfway straight again when it came to Ford, and instead panicking about what the kid was going to do to his ‘new enemy’ Ford, now that their deal _wasn’t_ in place anymore to keep the kid ‘playing nice’.

Because as much as the kid had told him about what life was like in that Nightmare Realm place, he’d only ever brought up friends and rivals, challengers and short-lived allies.

He’d never once described ever having an enemy, or what he’d ever done or would do to one.

And Stan was deathly afraid that the reason why he hadn't was because no-one, demon or nightmare, had ever survived the triangle long enough to reach that status.

\--He had to get through to his brother that trying to keep the kid from being able to defend himself would only make things worse. It would make the kid feel like he was backed into a corner. Instead of being as brutally straightforward as usual, the kid would decide he’d have to get _creative_ about how he ‘solved’ things, and the kid was both creative _and_ scarily-smart. Ford’s actions this morning might be problematic, but the _last_ thing Stan wanted was for the kid to decide to ‘solve’ Ford.

Ford was a genius, but creative Ford was not. All the kid lacked right that second was preparation time -- that was all he’d ever seemed to lack for anything, whenever he suffered a setback or a loss, from what Stan understood of things.

Ford would never see it coming. Stan _couldn’t_ let that happen.

\---

“Ford, you need to take those off him,” Stanley said.

“No, I don’t,” said Ford.

“He needs to be able to defend himself,” Stanley insisted, his voice getting darker.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Ford.

“Ford--” Stanley said, looking like he was gathering up anger like steam.

“--Thank you, Bill,” Ford cut Stanley off, with a fixed smile on his face.

“...For what,” Bill said flatly, eyeing him. He didn’t trust that smile in the least.

Ford dropped the smile. “For proving my brother a liar.”

“How do you figure _that_ , brainiac?” Bill told him flatly.

“For admitting that you can’t defend yourself with magic anymore, now that you have those on,” he was told.

“Really? That’s funny,” Bill said, without a laugh or smile in sight. “Because _I_ thought I was talking about how I can’t _move_.”

Ford’s eyes narrowed at him.

“Bill…?” Stanley said, and that was interesting. He hadn’t realized that Stanley had been objecting to the presence of the physical restraints out of nothing more than sheer principle alone. ...Well, that was fine. He could demonstrate.

Bill kept staring at Ford for several more seconds, because he was still very angry with his… self-styled and rather stupid ‘ _enemy_ ’.

Then he looked over at Stanley.

He lifted one arm up…

...about maybe a foot…

...and was able to hold it at that height for less than ten seconds before he had to stop, and let his arm -- and the heavy metal restraint wrapped around it -- fall back to the floorboards with a very heavy thud.

Stanley immediately turned to Ford and said, “--Get those things off him _right now_.”

“No,” said Ford.

“He can’t walk like that!” Stanley told him. “He’ll dislocate his shoulders!”

“Then I guess he’ll just have to spend a lot of time on the ground, then, won’t he,” Ford said with zero sympathy. Not that Bill had been expecting any.

Stanley glared at his brother for several long moments, then…

“Fine!” Stanley said, turning away from Ford and stomping towards Bill. “I’ll get them off him myself!” He kneeled down next to him and reached for the nearest restraint, the one on his left hand.

“Only if you want to risk losing your hands, and his, too,” Ford told him simply, and Stanley’s hands stopped inches away from touching the metal, while Bill’s eyes widened slightly as he began to examine the restraints far more carefully than he had initially.

“What?” Stanley said.

“Explosives,” Bill not-quite-asked, as he began to suss things out beyond the ‘anti-magic’ runes on the outer surfaces.

“Shaped charges,” Ford told them both cheerfully. “Specialized. They’ll take his hands off at the wrists, but cauterize the wounds,” Ford told them, “since bleeding out would kill him, and I certainly wouldn’t want to risk him possibly getting loose in the Mindscape because of a miscalculation like that.”

“And I’m guessing there’s _just_ enough shrapnel from the explosion outwards to ruin pretty much anyone’s day,” Bill added, staring evenly at Ford. “And there’s an electric-shock component to it, too, isn’t there?”

Ford’s smile got a little wider. “Yes.”

“Thought so,” Bill said casually, looking back down at them. “I thought they looked familiar.”

“Familiar?” Stanley said.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Your sibling’s not _nearly_ as smart as he likes to pretend he is,” Bill informed him, poking lightly at the restraints. “A lot of the stuff he knows? He didn’t come up with himself. He got it from someplace else. --Stole, in most cases,” he explained, because Ford wasn’t part of the agreement, and Ford had lied to him, and Ford _wasn’t_ his friend.

And if Ford wasn’t any of those things? Part of the agreement, trustworthy, or a friend? ...Well, Bill certainly didn’t have to play nice with him. And this was a _fine_ place to start.

Stanley didn’t want him getting in physical fights? Bill could do that. Bill was supposed to stop talking if he was told to stop _by anyone covered by the agreement_ , at least until he and Stanley had started getting into the specifics of mental warfare so that he had some sense of what was and was not disallowed as part of their agreement. And that? Was fine by him. Because Ford wasn’t part of the agreement.

Too bad for Ford.

“I designed these myself,” he heard Ford say, in a tone of voice that had very little of a semblance of a smile in it.

Bill let out something that was more a chuckle than a laugh, because boy, was Ford making it easy for him.

“You sure did,” he told Ford, looking up at him. “I even recognize where you got your mix-and-match technology from in Dimension 764.”

The rest of the smile on Ford’s face was lost completely.

“You see, Stanley,” Bill told him, “The restraints they put on the slaves there are the things with the whole electric-shock deal-y, but _those_ are collars, and they have a lock and key to them, because when they get passed between different owners, those new owners always want to change out the code for the remotes that they use to activate the things, to shock their slaves into submission, to their own special codeset. ...Now, the _other_ type of restraints that tend to get mass-produced over there for use, on the particular planet where Ford got to get a good look at the innards of these things, look a lot more like wrist-restraints, but they’re really meant for ankles and legs,” he explained, glancing over at Stanley, then back up at Ford. “Those go on, with a lot of high-yield explosive in them, and they’re never meant to come off -- no locks, no keys, just all one piece after it all comes together.”

“...Why would anyone do that?” Bill heard Shooting Star ask, sounding horrified.

“Entertainment,” Bill told her. “The people in charge of the _cute_ little planet that your ‘Grunkle’ got to visit about twenty years back -- yeah, I was watching you then, did you really think I ever wasn’t? -- _those_ people thought it was funny to grab people from off-planet that they didn’t like and, tch, ‘shove them in a ring and see who survives’ isn’t quite right,” Bill said, managing to raise one arm high enough and move it far enough quickly enough that he could clunk it down on the other side of him and sit a bit more upright. “‘Have them start at one end of the city and try to make it to the other side without dying’ is a bit closer, except that doesn’t necessarily imply that half the citizens living there get a bonus if they help you, the other half get one for hurting or killing you, and you don’t know which ones are which?”

“Bill,” Ford said quietly.

“That also leaves out the part where the party-planners tell the happy-contenders that the explosive anklets _can_ come off, but leave out the part about the lack of lock-and-key, or the explosives, so the whole ‘comes off, but only by exploding off’ part is a bit of a surprise. --Surprise!!” Bill tells them, while thinking his way through several potential internal schematics of the cuffs Ford had made in his head.

“ _Happy_ contenders??” Pine Tree repeated, and Bill saw Ford stiffen.

“ _Bill_ ,” Ford said with more of an edge to his voice.

Bill got a slight smile.

“Oh, yeah,” he told the three of them not yet in-the-know, as he absently traced over the lines of the ‘anti-magic’ runes. Ha. “You see, kid, since this is one of those ‘fun local customs’ and nobody ever survives the thing, and it’s by ‘special invitation only’, with everybody else they can find shoved off-planet in the meantime…” Bill shrugged. “None of the offworlders they usually grab for this sort of thing know any better, so…” Bill’s smile got a little wider. “The locals tell ‘em that the more ‘weights’ they can carry attached to them to the end of the race before the four-day timer goes off, the bigger the prize money.”

There was a long silent pause.

“...There’s no prize money, is there,” Stanley said finally.

“Not even a little,” Bill confirmed. “--Well, only for the locals,” he amended. “But hey, good times all-around, right?”

“Can you get out of these things without hurting yourself?” Stanley asked him, apropos of nothing, and Bill blinked.

“...Maybe,” Bill said carefully. “Do you want me to?”

“Yes,” Stanley told him firmly, “If you can do it, then do it,” and Bill pulled in a slow breath, because that was all he’d really needed. _More_ than he’d needed, in fact.

Then he looked up at Ford again, who was standing where he was with his jaw clenched.

Bill grinned. Ford was _such_ an idiot when he came to magic -- _and_ completely wide open to mental attack even with the metal plate in his head. He just didn’t know it yet.

Well, he would in a few seconds...

“Might be a bit more difficult than either or us would like, though, Stanley,” Bill started in conversational tones. “Because I’m thinking that these are more like the anklets than the collars, when it comes to a lock and key,” Bill told Stanley, tilting his head at Ford. “Because your _sibling_ here wouldn’t want to risk you actually being able to get these things off of me, with how good you are with a set of lockpicks.” His grin got a little wider. “But I’m thinking that your ‘conquering hero’ here _probably_ isn’t too happy with being called out for having something _very much in common_ wiiiiith… hmm, well, I suppose the _nicest_ description of those people-in-charge would be ‘warlord’,” Ford’s frown got darker, and Bill’s grin got wider. “But what they _usually_ get referred to as,” Bill said almost teasingly, “is more liiiiike... oh, let’s see, what’s the _best_ single-word in your language forrrr…” Bill took in a breath and looked Ford straight in the eye as he said, as quickly as he could, ”--a murdering-psychopathic-conscienceless-baby-eating--?”

And with that, Bill felt every muscle in his body go rigid, and the world whited out for a bit.

When Bill came to again, he rolled over, coughing -- well, _tried_ to roll over, and then remembered why he couldn’t when he realized all over again that he couldn’t.

“Oof, ow,” Bill said hazily, trying to lift his head, “Not sure about that amp’rage there, Stanf’rd, you maybe wanna up that a littl’?”

“More amperage will hurt you _worse_ , Bill,” he heard Pine Tree tell him, over and in front of him.

“Yeahhhh, ‘s’called sarcasm, kid,” Bill slurred out, staring at Pine Tree’s socks and shoes, before letting his head drop back down to the wooden floorboards. “Guy’s s’pposed to be a genius and gets his volt’z an’ amps mix’d up? Bett’r call Glasses! HA!”

“You think this is _funny!?_ ” Ford practically yelled down at him from up above and behind him.

Bill rolled his eyes up in his direction. Mostly.

“No, 'Ford. I think... this is... HILARIOUS,” he said slowly, taking the time to make sure he was enunciating everything correctly, through the alternating numbness and pain. He finally pulled in a deeper breath. “I think... that it is HILARIOUS... that YOU think... that _I_ am having... a BAD DAY!”

“You’re not having a bad day?” Bill heard Shooting Star whisper to him, close to his ear, and his body twitched in an almost-flinch.

“...Not ev’n a little,” he muttered to her, almost into the floor, closing his eyes and trying to let his muscles slowly finish spasming at odd intervals and fully relax. Ford had already described his own limits -- he wasn’t willing to kill Bill, because he wasn’t willing to risk that killing his current physical form might potentially free Bill from it. And with that constraining and restricting Ford, Ford had already lost. Ford would never beat him at this sort of game, because Bill had survived things that would melt any other being’s brains out of their ears within the first few seconds of exposure, and Bill was already insane. “Remind me t’ tell you about burnin’ down my home dim’nsion sometime,” he murmured out to Shooting Star.

“You burned down _what?_ ” he heard her say, but pretended he hadn’t.

“He burned down his own dimension,” Bill heard Ford say, and Bill grimaced. He’d thought Ford was farther away. “He killed everyone. And that’s not the _only_ dimension he’s destroyed, either. He’s collapsed several other dimensions into the Nightmare Realm, as well.” There was a slight pause. “He’s a monster, Mabel. Don’t ever forget that.”

Oh. Oh, that was _hilarious_. When would Ford ever learn not to shoot himself in the foot like that, and remind Bill of things that would give even more ideas to Bill in the process? _\--Never?_

“Oh, ‘m sure she won’t, what with _you_ around t’ remind her all about monst’rs,” Bill murmured out sing-song, starting to grin all over again.

He got a hard kick in the leg for his trouble.

“-- _Ford!_ ” he heard Stanley object.

“Oh, but I star-ted it,” Bill said out a good bit louder, just as sing-song.

“SHUT UP!!” Ford yelled at him again.

“Monsters-monsters-ev’rywhere,” Bill continued, sing-song.

Ford let out an inarticulate scream and the next thing Bill knew, Bill was doubled-up from a kick in the gut, and coughing.

“-- _FORD!!!_ ” Stan yelled out, grabbing Ford and pulling him back by a grip on his shoulder.

“Should I tell them all what _you_ were doing on that planet, Ford, while all this was going on? How you know how these things work, to put them together?” Bill forced out through and in spite of the pain in his midsection, continuing to grin. “Since we’re all on the subject of _monsters_ \--” and his grin became bloody rather quickly, when the next thing Ford did was scream out again as he kicked him in the _face_ and then reached for him--

\--and then Ford had his six-fingered hands fisted in Bill’s shirt, one hand letting go to pull back in a fist, and Stanley had a chokehold around Ford’s neck with full-leverage, squeezing tight, and Ford was too preoccupied with trying to try and move forward while figuring out how best to hurt Bill, with _where_ to hit Bill, that he didn’t realize that what Stanley had on him was a _sleeper hold_ until he was already almost under at the third second in.

Ford barely managed to get himself out of his hold before the fifth second of blocked bloodflow and unconsciousness.

And Stanley was panting and between them. _Physically standing between them_ , now.

“Ford, keep your hands off him!” Stanley barked out, fists up.

“I-- I’m not--” Ford panted out from his crouch on the ground, arms spread wide for balance, ready to spring up and pounce like an _animal_ , eyes wide and looking almost as crazy as Bill had ever seen him on his worst most-sleep-deprived days, “I’m _not_ \--”

‘ _\--a monster? Ha. Too easy._ ’ “Take a goooooood look kids,” Bill crooned out around the tang of blood in his mouth, still-grinning. “Say hello to the guy who I wanted to lead my Henchmaniacs~~” he lowered the tone of his voice slightly, “and _this_ is why.”

And Bill saw the words hit and almost _shatter_ something inside Ford’s head.

Yeah. He’d honestly wondered if it had really been his hands that had been the thing Ford had fixated on, when it came to ‘fitting in’ with the rest of the demons and nightmares he called friends. Turned out that it had been!

‘ _\--Well, **not anymore** ,_’ Bill thought with a grin. The cracks were showing.

He took in a breath, about to bring up ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and force Ford to admit that that was the only real criteria he needed for justifying absolutely anything -- ‘stopping evil’; and once he had _that_ , then he’d _prove_ to Ford how easy it was for him, Bill Cipher, Master of the Mind, to switch concepts around inside a person’s brain -- heck, he’d done it to this Ford already once -- and then he wouldn’t have to do anything else; he could just sit back and watch Ford begin to go completely insane at the realization that all Bill would need was _two seconds_ alone and unimpeded inside his Mindscape to--

“NO!!!” Shooting Star screamed out, and Bill lost his grin and his train of thought derailed abruptly as he whipped his head around to try and look over at her, because the kid had sounded _panicked_ in the _extreme_.

He couldn’t see her or what had set her off, so he didn’t bother to waste time with theatrics -- Stanley had already made it clear how badly he wanted Bill out of his restraints, and he hadn’t changed his mind yet; Bill could use that, so he did -- he metaphysically leaned against the anchor on his back _hard_ , grabbed what he could that was made available to him in that short split-second period of time -- and it was enough.

He depleted it quickly, lifting his arms straight-up out of the restraints in a flash -- like they were smoke, even though they weren’t -- like those restraints, and him, were all in the Mindscape, where matter simply couldn’t interact with other matter, not even itself.

And once he was free, he rolled over into a crouch, shoved himself to his feet in a rush, and he glanced around hurriedly, yanking out the switchblade Stanley had given him and keeping his hands raised slightly, as he leaned against the side of the porch to help support his weight, craning his neck around trying to see what she had been yelling about.

...He didn’t see anything. At all. It was just the four of them.

Bill lowered his knife slightly and turned his head to look down at her in confusion.

\---

The kid was up and out in literally less than two seconds.

Mabel had screamed, the kid had immediately shut up and twisted his head around, and Stan had thought for a moment that that would be that. That he’d be able to call a time-out or something, and drag Ford and the kid away from each others’ throats for awhile -- maybe even talk some sense into the both of them, if he burned what little luck he had left, and spun words and promises and threats and compromises out fast enough...

But now he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to laugh or to cry, because the kid hadn’t realized that she’d been screaming at them _all_ to _stop_. To stop talking. To stop fighting. That all he’d needed to do was shut up and stop talking like they’d talked about with accidental mental attacks until further notice. That what had happened was that Mabel had gotten caught up in his crossfire with Ford.

The kid hadn’t just shut up. Mabel had screamed ‘no!’, not ‘stop!’, and words meant very _specific_ things to the kid.

He hadn’t thought ‘no’ could have really meant ‘stop’. He’d actually thought Mabel had been being _physically attacked_ with how freaked out she’d sounded.

He’d ripped his hands right up out of Ford’s oh-so-magically-resistant restraints -- so quickly his arms had almost blurred -- leaving the restraints behind on the floor of the porch and _intact_ as he'd rolled over, sprung to his feet, gotten himself a safe vantage point halfway behind one of the posts on the porch for both cover and bracing, and _pulled his freaking switchblade_ out from under the back of his shirt, aiming it out at the yard as he scanned for attackers.

Less than two seconds. Maybe a second-and-a-half, tops.

Stan hadn’t even realized the kid had had the switchblade on him. He hadn’t seen where the kid had put it, after he’d given it to him, and the kid hadn’t pulled it since… _ever_. The kid had outright told him he didn’t want to carry it when Stan had tried to give it to him; the kid had cited not wanting to push Ford into doing anything stupid if he realized that he had the weapon on him, that Ford would consider it a matter of principle to react badly and take it off him, and then be pissy about it later for a good long time. Stan had done everything short of blackmail to finally get the kid to take it from him anyway, despite this, along with a pair of knuckledusters, and all three items had just disappeared he wasn’t sure where. He had thought the kid getting quiet on the subject towards the end of Stan’s convincing had meant he’d stayed stubborn, that the kid had just taken them and hid them in their bedroom somewhere instead of wearing or carrying them. Stan had never pressed the kid on it. Just getting the kid to take them from him at all had been enough of a struggle.

If the kid had pulled that knife on Ford… the kid could’ve gutted him in less than a _second_. Tops.

Or maybe he was underestimating his brother, who had in the same amount of time -- and in response to the kid’s motion -- shoved himself backwards, in a crouch, gotten his back against the side of the Shack, and grabbed at and reflexively started to lift a hand away from the empty holster at his side where his electric sci-fi gun _should_ be (and would have been if Stan hadn’t taken it away from Ford only a little earlier that day, for the sheer idiocy he’d displayed in running after and firing at the kid in the woods) in a clearly-recognizable gun-drawing motion. Either way, if the kid had pulled the knife and even tried to _throw_ it at Ford… The idea made Stan have to cover a wince, because that knife was pretty well-balanced...

But the kid hadn’t. He hadn’t done anything like that, tried to pull it on Ford, throw it at him, or otherwise attack him with it. He’d only pulled it ‘in an emergency’, and now Stan knew where the kid drew the line.

As part of their ‘mutual nonaggression agreement’, the older ‘members’ were supposed to look out for the younger ones. Dipper and Mabel weren’t expected to protect anyone but themselves, but Wendy and Soos were expected -- if not all-but-required -- to help protect them; Stan as the oldest and the agreement-holder would protect all of them.

The kid fell in-between Wendy and Soos in physical body-age, and he was taking the agreement seriously. He’d dropped everything he was doing, gotten himself on his feet, and made ready to protect Mabel _with the knife_ , when he hadn’t pulled it for anything or anyone else.

Ford had run after him in the forest, shooting at him; Ford had grabbed him several times on the porch, and physically overpowered him. And after Ford had called off their deal, leaving the kid no real excuse to hold back at all anymore, Ford had beaten him into the porch, twice now, and tried to subdue him with a pair of explosive armbands, and even electric-shocked him with the things. And yet… there had been no knife appearance. Until now.

The kid honestly didn’t consider Ford a _threat_. That was… actually kind of scary.

Was the kid _letting_ him do it every time? Or was the kid’s scale for measuring threats and his general responsiveness so broken that he considered taking a hit or twelve fine, so long as he survived the beating and it got him into a position where he was able to…

...to get back up again and immediately kill whomever had just challenged him.

Stan didn’t like thinking about it, but the kid had been pretty explicit about that part of it. How things usually went, in what floating broken remnants had been left of his home dimension. How the triangle had handled things, in order to survive and continue to survive, there.

How the kid thought everyplace was like that, and was still incredibly skeptical when Stan tried to explain to him that the ‘guidelines’ of the agreement really were the way things could and should go in this dimension, _with everyone_ , in order to be able to survive without having to fight-to-kill at every turn.

Stan didn’t like thinking about the fact that, right now, unless he somehow found a way to convince the kid otherwise, Ford had a death sentence hanging over his head. Because it was clear at this point that what Stan had been worried might be the case, almost right from the start, was in fact true -- the kid couldn’t be contained. Not by force.

Stan took in a breath, and shifted in-place sideways. First-things-first, he could start out by making it clear that things were at least a little harder on the ‘killing-Ford’ front than the kid might think. ...And to do that, he was going to have to bring up some complexity to the agreement they had that he’d been hoping to avoid -- that he’d hoped would never have to become an issue in the first place.

“Kid, breathe,” Stan told him. “Mental attack, not physical.” At the kid’s startled look and continued confusion, he added, “Rebound effect. Echoes. Mabel cares about Ford; she feels hurt when he hurts.”

He saw when the kid got it, and the waves of sheer frustration coming off of the kid were palpable in the air.

“So, _what_ ,” the kid spat out, flipping the knife closed and putting it away -- in a casual, practiced motion, holy pineapple water -- while shooting Ford a glare to end all glares, “I’m not allowed to attack him whenever she’s around?”

“ _Don’t kill him!_ ’ Mabel yelled out shakily, and with the way the kid twisted his head around to look down at her, eyes-wide…

He looked up at Stan again, eyes narrowing. “--I’m not allowed to _kill_ him, because--?!” he gestured at Mabel. Stan nodded, immediately -- because really, that was the best opening he could have possibly asked for, and then some, so he took it. The kid stared down at Mabel again, then looked away, his expression turning absolutely irate. He closed his eyes, blew out a breath, shook his head, pulled in a breath as he opened his eyes again, and moved his gaze back to Stan again, with squared shoulders and gritted teeth. “ _We need to talk._ ”

“No kidding,” Stan told him blandly. Their agreement was likely going to need an overhaul, after this, and he didn’t want things going any further -- or getting any worse -- than they already had in the meantime.

“--You have to do what he says,” came a hushed declaration from Dipper, and Stan looked over at him with a blank stare, because _what?_ The kid wasn’t calling the shots; did it really look that way?

But Dipper wasn’t staring at him. He was staring at the kid, with a look of dawning comprehension.

With the way the kid shifted on his feet, recentering his center of mass, and narrowed his eyes slightly as he looked down at Dipper sidelong, Stan got a very bad feeling all of a sudden.

“I do not,” said Bill, and--

That was it, Stan was stopping this right there.

“--That’s not how the agreement works, Dipper, and that’s not what I expect outta him for staying here with us,” Stan told him tersely, because if he didn’t make this crystal clear to the rest of his family _right now_ \--

“Not the agreement,” Dipper said, sounding almost excited, “The tattoo!”

“Dipper, for the last time, I don’t have a tattoo--” Stan barked out almost on autopilot, and then he stopped and stared.

‘ _Oh, no_ ,’ Stan thought, not looking at the kid yet. ‘ _Oh no. Please let this not be a thing,_ ’ he pleaded to Paul Bunyan.

“You wanted him out of those restraints, and he got out of those restraints,” Dipper said with an odd almost-strangled tone. “That wasn’t magic; that was _Bill_. He wasn’t able to do that until you told him that. --You weren’t, were you,” Dipper said, addressing the kid, and that was enough of that.

“Dipper--” Stan began.

“--And you were _real_ careful how you asked him,” Dipper said to the kid, starting to sound smug.

“ _DIPPER!_ ” Stan bellowed out, and his grand-nephew startled and finally shut up.

It was quiet on the porch for a moment.

Stan pinched the bridge of his nose and asked, without looking at the kid, “Kid, I don’t really wanna know, but I gotta ask: is that thing you’ve got all down your back screwing with your brain anywhere _near_ as badly as that deal you had with Ford?” he said, dropping his hand and looking over at the kid, feeling a little afraid of the answer and trying his hardest not to show it. --He was a con-man; it didn’t show.

The kid was clenching his jaw and looking away, and a lot of expressions ran across his face during that time -- none of which were making Stan feel any better.

He saw the kid eventually get ahold of himself, close his eyes, take in a breath, and say, “No. It’s not screwing with my brain or my mind at all. That’s not how it works.”

And then Stan heard a slight laugh out of Ford.

“You--” Ford began, slowly pushing himself up onto his feet again but looking shocky as hell still. He was getting the start of a very faint smile as he stared at the kid. “You’re _bound_ \--”

“--Shut it, Ford!” the kid rounded on him, fists clenched, angry in the extreme. “You think you know what you’re talking about? I’m ONE TRILLION years old, and I’ve FORGOTTEN more about magic than you’ve EVER known about how magical systems work! --Oh, _WAIT_ ,” the kid said, his voice descending into truly ugly tones, “ _That’s_ right. I’VE got a perfect memory, which means I’ve forgotten _NOTHING_ , and _YOU_ don’t know how even ONE system of magic functions, because you don’t actually know how ANY type of magic works _AT ALL!_ ” the kid yelled out at him, “So **SHUT IT!!** ”

“Okay, that’s it, we’re done,” Stan said quickly and hopefully authoritatively, dropping a hand down on the kid’s shoulder. “I am officially calling today over. The kid and me? Are going to our bedroom to talk, and then fall asleep. You three,” he glanced around at them, “can do whatever, as long as you’re quiet about it, and are anywhere else in the house.”

And with that, he started steering the kid by the hand on his shoulder towards the door to the inside.

“Where did he get that knife, Stanley?” Ford asked him thinly, as Stan walked up to the door, pushing the kid through, and Stan rounded on him.

“I gave it to him, Ford,” he told his brother flatly, straight out. “I gave it to him because he needs to be able to defend himself -- _because that barrier of yours doesn’t keep purely physical threats out_ ,” he raised his voice, to override Ford, “and there’s no way the kid can handle a physical fight without being armed while he’s inside the Shack, inside your voodoo barrier.”

“Stanley--”

“He needs to be able to defend himself,” Stan repeated doggedly but firmly. “ _If you have a problem with that_ ,” Stan continued, “Then you come talk to me. But I want him armed, I’m keeping him armed -- and _no_ ,” he said, turning to the kid in question, “you do _not_ get to use ‘see, I told you Ford wouldn’t like it’ as an excuse to try and stop carrying any of that type of stuff around.”

“It isn’t safe for him to have it when--!” Ford began more hotly, the implications of hearing what he’d just told the kid flying right over his head, and Stan had had enough.

“--He’s had it since _day two_ , Ford,” Stan told him quellingly. “That’s when I gave it to him. That night. _This_ is the first time he’s pulled it. Because he thought Mabel was being attacked by somebody else. You just stand there and you think about that,” he told his brother, while stomping the rest of the way into the Shack.

“ _Bill!_ ” Stan heard Mabel call from behind them, and the kid stopped in his tracks and turned back slightly, while Stan started mentally cursing inside his own head, because now was really _not_ the time--

He glanced back over his shoulder to see Mabel standing there, framed in the doorway, straight-backed and looking a bit pale and nervous, but feet planted and standing strong, head back and her sweater-covered arms crossed.

“I’m still going to give you a shower,” Mabel said to the kid firmly, though with a slight stressed wavering to her voice still, as she looked up at him. Then Stan watched with amazement as she took in a breath, and frowned seriously up at the kid, as serious as he’d ever seen her. “And _you_ are gonna tell me what won’t work, mister!” she added authoritatively, pointing at him, with no hesitation in her voice at all.

Stan stared, blinking, then glanced sideways over at the kid.

The kid was staring at her, too, without any real expression on his face.

Then the kid rolled his eyes -- with an expression caught somewhere between amused, annoyed, and vaguely _harassed_ \-- and let out something that almost resembled a short laugh.

“-- _Doubtful_ ,” the kid told her, with a narrow-eyed look -- and a slight, edged smile on his face -- before turning back around and walking away, farther into the Shack.

Stan stared after him, his brain whirring away, trying to catch up.

He caught up to the kid in two steps. “Did you really mean that?” he asked the kid under his breath. Because…

...the kid had seemed furious with Ford, and angry with Stan himself out on the porch, but, now that Stan thought about it, when it had come to Mabel...

The kid gave him a semi-confused ‘what the hell are you hassling me about this for?’ look back over his shoulder at him, then looked away. “I _said_ it was ‘doubtful’, didn’t I?” the kid not quite grumbled out, crossing his arms.

Stan felt his eyebrows go up. He really couldn’t help it. Because...

“...That’s not a ‘no’, y’know,” Stan pointed out, staring at him.

The kid grumbled something else under his breath that Stan didn’t quite catch, while refusing to look at him, arms still crossed, _and his shoulders curved inwards slightly_.

As they walked, Stan watched the kid with a very different sort of amazement than he’d felt while watching his grand-niece accost the kid like she had. And then Stan decided that maybe it’d be best to just leave it alone for now.

And with that, Stan herded the kid the rest of the way through the Shack and into their shared bedroom without any more talking between them.

\---


End file.
